If it's CounterStrike or GTA IV, there's no such thing as "too realistic".
Not sure I agree. Or at least, there's such a thing as "realistic enough". Admittedly, it is a moving target.
I still play CS1. My official reason for not upgrading is that my graphics hardware only just supports source. But still, if I really cared I could easily throw a new graphics card in my box for not very much cash, and the rest is up to spec. CS1 is good enough, though, so I see no pressing reason to spend the money.
You can create an artistic style for your game that doesn't require high-end graphics, but if you're game has a realism based art style your graphics should match.
Exactly.
I've spent a while playing free-to-play MMOs recently, just to get an idea of what's out there. Most of them are graphically uninspiring, whether they're 2D or 3D. Sure, you can see somebody spent some real money on some of those 3D games, but one game I've played has, in my opinion, blown them all away: Travian. A browser-based game, with static graphics. But the graphics are well done, and really fit the game. Sure, they're cartoons, but they're good quality and represent what the game's about without calling attention to themselves. The design is clean and attractive, no unnecessary complication. It all fits together really well.
An additional comment, I meant to include in my previous post, but forgot about before I clicked post:
Entering a state of flow is only one way of enjoying entertainment. Some people think it's the best way, but that's not universally true. Others enjoy thinking analytically about the experience, and some genres need it less than others. For an FPS game, I'd say it's pretty much crucial. RTS games, not quite so much but still helpful. Turn-based games it isn't important at all, because we can take the time to think about things and approach it from effectively the opposite direction. MMORPGs also don't need it as much; we can share the experience with other players and derive enjoyment from discussions about the game rather than playing the game itself. Think of it like watching a film with friends and joking about the bad acting, etc. It's a different way of approaching it that you enjoy for a different reason.
Ah, so your not a fan of casablanca, or more likely since this is a/. crowd 2001: a space odyssey?
I'm sorry, but just because something is old does not by default make it crap. Quality is quality, if something was ever truly good it should be able to stand up on it's own regardless of graphics.
Yes & no. What's important, really, is that the graphics of the game don't call attention to themselves. Which sounds like a strange thing to say, but it is true, and it follows from the basic fact that when we engage in playing a game (or reading a book, or watching a film) we enter a mental state that's basically a form of flow, and thoughts that are unrelated to what we are doing can quite easily disturb that state -- thoughts about the implementation of the game (as revealed by bad graphics) are particularly problematic, as are scenes of films with bad acting, or logical inconsistencies in the story, etc.
So the suggestion I'd have is that there's a minimum quality of graphics that's required, which clearly varies from person to person depending on how good they are at maintaining flow. And also that standard is gradually increasing, because how we judge it is relative to what we've seen in other games. When I was playing Elite back in the 80s, black & white wireframe 3D graphics were good enough. I find it hard to immerse myself in that now.
For films, the technology isn't as important. It reached a point a long time ago where it was good enough, at least for most people. Some people find black and white films disruptive their ability to immerse themselves, and for those Casablanca is almost unwatchable. Few people object to 2001 on the basis of poor technology (although storytelling techniques have progressed since then, and I don't think anyone with any skill would make a film that was that _slow_ again), although the trippy effects at the end pull some people out of flow these days (although they were more likely to have the opposite effect when the film was first released). But go back and watch films like le Voyage dans la Lune and you'll probably find you simply _cannot_ enjoy them in the same way the first audiences to see them did, because it is so hard to focus on the story when the techniques that were used to film it draw attention to themselves so much.
Not that it really matters, but the Design Patterns book just under 15 years old (published October of 1994),
It depends what you consider the relevant date... from our perspective, publication date is the most critical thing. From the perspective of an author, and from the perspective of somebody trying to place it in history alongside things that might have influenced it, the date of the last word being written is probably more relevant, which given the glacial pace of publishing was probably 6 months or so prior to publication.
and it certainly doesn't predate the Internet
This is clearly true. I'm thinking that what he meant to say was probably the popularisation of the Internet. Which is hard to place a date on, but probably occurred not long before the first.com bubble began, some time around '96 or '97 by my estimation.
You're telling me there are places where that's not true?
Yep. Here in the UK, for instance, there is an offence of failing to disclose the identity of the driver of a vehicle which was registered to you at a time when it was witnessed committing an offence. The offence is, basically, more serious than any other driving offence, so when the police ask you to tell them who was driving, you tell them.
Seems logical to me. An IP address no more identifies a person than a house address identifies one. It's tying those two together for investigative purposes that should be illegal without a warrant.
Indeed: and the difference in EU law is that under EU law an item is considered personally identifying if it is plausible that it could be used to identify individual people in a significant number of cases using information that is likely to be available to the person collecting the data. It's a matter of different definitions:
US law: "personally identifying" means "identifies a person in all cases" EU law: "personally identifying" means "could plausibly be used to identify a person in at least some cases"
The different laws in these different jurisdictions use the same phrase for different purposes and with different consequences. Is it really any surprise, therefore, that they are interpreted differently?
Not saying I believe any of these to be valid, but these are the concerns people are likely to have:
1. "Playing god."
There is a major taboo with messing with our reproductive systems, and every time any major advance in reproductive science occurs, there are religious arguments against it. Compare it with IVF and birth control, both of which attracted a lot of attention from a number of religions and are considered unethical by many.
2. The technique enables a major change in the reproduction of our species. There does not appear to be any reason why the stem cells would have to come from male donor; this tecnique could result in a child with two female biological parents. Potentially even only one female biological parent. I can understand why this would worry a lot of people.
3. A child resulting from the use of this technique is quite likely to have a biological parent who never actually lived. This is a rather peculiar potential outcome, and may well worry some people.
I don't personally see any of these as a serious problem, as long as the technique is used sparingly. But you can bet there are a lot of people who find some or all of these ideas repugnant.
Someone decides that the best way to do it is to put 10 in swords, 11 in shields, and 15 in fireballs...and all of a sudden that's what everyone is playing. So you wind up with absolutely no variety.
One solution to this is, of course, to design the PvE encounters so that a variety of different skills are needed, and _different players have to have them_. Sure, you need a player who's good at fireballs, but he needs to be standing back and handling the horde of little monsters that will heal the boss monster if they get too close, while your guy who's good with his sword and shield gets up close and finishes off the boss. Or other scenarios like that where you need two or more players who are good with just one or two different skills, rather than one ultra-powerful player who can do everything. And each encounter will require a different combination of skills. Some skills will be useless in some encounters; sometimes a particular skill will basically be essential. Design the game to encourage specialisation and cooperation rather than individual players learning everything.
Thoughtcrimes have been on the books for years, except they're called "hate crimes".
Hate crimes are not thoughtcrime. Hate crimes are, typically, antipropoganda crimes -- they make it illegal to attempt to rouse a group of people into active hatred of another group. This is very different from what a lot of people seem to think of them as, i.e. laws against hating a group of people.
I don't think it's a bug at all. I believe Slashdot's CSS designer _intended_ this to happen. It's too much of a coincidence that the style for 'i' is the same as the style for 'blockquote' and many slashdot posters (myself included) use the two for the same purpose.
Eve Online is brutal even in the safe areas. Anyone that ventures off the ranch gets smoked quick. Sounds the complete opposite of City of Heroes.
Have you actually played Eve? When I was a player I regularly spent time outside of the safe areas, e.g. visiting stations in low security systems that had cheap stuff I wanted, and was never attacked by another player. Seemed to me that as long as you minded your own business, and got in & out reasonably quickly, you were pretty safe.
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats?
Is it really that big a surprise? Given that some of the largest, most information-heavy sites on the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia) use it for their internal search?
They likely looked at the kind of engineering problems a cup holder would present and decided it was too hard.
Think about it: 0-60 in 2.5 seconds == 10.72m/s^2. This car accelerates at _over 1G_. The cup holder would have to automatically swivel through 45 degrees to prevent it spilling your drink when you put your foot to the floor.
Having read the first 2 pages of TFA, I still don't see how fast of a connection you need for these to become playable. I mean, where I live, the best connection you can get is a ~1 Megabit DSL connection
The company's site states that it will work with a 512kbit connection, but that for best quality you should have 2Mbit.
I imagine they'll be using a 1-server-per-client model, at least with most games. Subscriptions will be expensive, at a guess, with the price worked out on the assumption that you'll be tying up a high-end gaming machine about 10-15% of the time. $120 or $180 per year sounds like a likely base price for the subscription, plus a small additional fee for game rental which will depend on what you're playing.
there isn't even a ps2 emu for iPhone and I doubt its powerful enough
I think we can assume you're correct. The fastest iPhone has a 600 MHz ARM Cortex processor with 2 execution units, whose base instruction set is 32-bit, but which supports 128-bit SIMD. The PS2 has a ~400MHz 64-bit MIPS-compatible processor with 2 execution units, also implementing 128-bit SIMD. Therefore, while the iPhone with a best-theoretically-possible emulator might manage to match or even beat the SIMD performace of the PS2, ordinary 64 bit instructions would necessarily be a little slower (taking 2 x 32-bit instructions to implement them), resulting in only a maximum of 600 being retired each microsecond, rather than 800 as the PS2 is (at least theoretically) capable of. This is ignoring emulation overheads, of course. And the question of emulation of the PS2's vector units, which would have to be mapped to the iPhone's GPU somehow.
I'd love to have this available for personal implementation.
I think you'd be surprised by how much an implementation of this would cost to set up. The only way, AFAICS, that they can be encoding the video output of the games to h.264 fast enough is a dedicated hardware encoder, which is probably about $2-300 worth of kit. Sure, you can do live h.264 encoding with a PC, but the latency is typically in the order of 10-15 frames or so, which would be unacceptable for this application.
I've messed with software RAID in Windows 2003 server for years and have never had a drive failure not reported to the Event Log.
Well, sure, but how often do you read your event log? Most users _never_ read their event log, so logging the failure like this is next to useless. This is something the user needs to know about, immediately. At the very least a notification area icon and pop-out box would be appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's CounterStrike or GTA IV, there's no such thing as "too realistic".
Not sure I agree. Or at least, there's such a thing as "realistic enough". Admittedly, it is a moving target.
I still play CS1. My official reason for not upgrading is that my graphics hardware only just supports source. But still, if I really cared I could easily throw a new graphics card in my box for not very much cash, and the rest is up to spec. CS1 is good enough, though, so I see no pressing reason to spend the money.
You can create an artistic style for your game that doesn't require high-end graphics, but if you're game has a realism based art style your graphics should match.
Exactly.
I've spent a while playing free-to-play MMOs recently, just to get an idea of what's out there. Most of them are graphically uninspiring, whether they're 2D or 3D. Sure, you can see somebody spent some real money on some of those 3D games, but one game I've played has, in my opinion, blown them all away: Travian. A browser-based game, with static graphics. But the graphics are well done, and really fit the game. Sure, they're cartoons, but they're good quality and represent what the game's about without calling attention to themselves. The design is clean and attractive, no unnecessary complication. It all fits together really well.
An additional comment, I meant to include in my previous post, but forgot about before I clicked post:
Entering a state of flow is only one way of enjoying entertainment. Some people think it's the best way, but that's not universally true. Others enjoy thinking analytically about the experience, and some genres need it less than others. For an FPS game, I'd say it's pretty much crucial. RTS games, not quite so much but still helpful. Turn-based games it isn't important at all, because we can take the time to think about things and approach it from effectively the opposite direction. MMORPGs also don't need it as much; we can share the experience with other players and derive enjoyment from discussions about the game rather than playing the game itself. Think of it like watching a film with friends and joking about the bad acting, etc. It's a different way of approaching it that you enjoy for a different reason.
Ah, so your not a fan of casablanca, or more likely since this is a /. crowd 2001: a space odyssey?
I'm sorry, but just because something is old does not by default make it crap. Quality is quality, if something was ever truly good it should be able to stand up on it's own regardless of graphics.
Yes & no. What's important, really, is that the graphics of the game don't call attention to themselves. Which sounds like a strange thing to say, but it is true, and it follows from the basic fact that when we engage in playing a game (or reading a book, or watching a film) we enter a mental state that's basically a form of flow, and thoughts that are unrelated to what we are doing can quite easily disturb that state -- thoughts about the implementation of the game (as revealed by bad graphics) are particularly problematic, as are scenes of films with bad acting, or logical inconsistencies in the story, etc.
So the suggestion I'd have is that there's a minimum quality of graphics that's required, which clearly varies from person to person depending on how good they are at maintaining flow. And also that standard is gradually increasing, because how we judge it is relative to what we've seen in other games. When I was playing Elite back in the 80s, black & white wireframe 3D graphics were good enough. I find it hard to immerse myself in that now.
For films, the technology isn't as important. It reached a point a long time ago where it was good enough, at least for most people. Some people find black and white films disruptive their ability to immerse themselves, and for those Casablanca is almost unwatchable. Few people object to 2001 on the basis of poor technology (although storytelling techniques have progressed since then, and I don't think anyone with any skill would make a film that was that _slow_ again), although the trippy effects at the end pull some people out of flow these days (although they were more likely to have the opposite effect when the film was first released). But go back and watch films like le Voyage dans la Lune and you'll probably find you simply _cannot_ enjoy them in the same way the first audiences to see them did, because it is so hard to focus on the story when the techniques that were used to film it draw attention to themselves so much.
1024 terabytes should then weight 16384 grams, or a bit more than 16kg.
Or exactly 16Kig.
Not that it really matters, but the Design Patterns book just under 15 years old (published October of 1994),
It depends what you consider the relevant date... from our perspective, publication date is the most critical thing. From the perspective of an author, and from the perspective of somebody trying to place it in history alongside things that might have influenced it, the date of the last word being written is probably more relevant, which given the glacial pace of publishing was probably 6 months or so prior to publication.
and it certainly doesn't predate the Internet
This is clearly true. I'm thinking that what he meant to say was probably the popularisation of the Internet. Which is hard to place a date on, but probably occurred not long before the first .com bubble began, some time around '96 or '97 by my estimation.
You're telling me there are places where that's not true?
Yep. Here in the UK, for instance, there is an offence of failing to disclose the identity of the driver of a vehicle which was registered to you at a time when it was witnessed committing an offence. The offence is, basically, more serious than any other driving offence, so when the police ask you to tell them who was driving, you tell them.
Seems logical to me. An IP address no more identifies a person than a house address identifies one. It's tying those two together for investigative purposes that should be illegal without a warrant.
Indeed: and the difference in EU law is that under EU law an item is considered personally identifying if it is plausible that it could be used to identify individual people in a significant number of cases using information that is likely to be available to the person collecting the data. It's a matter of different definitions:
US law: "personally identifying" means "identifies a person in all cases"
EU law: "personally identifying" means "could plausibly be used to identify a person in at least some cases"
The different laws in these different jurisdictions use the same phrase for different purposes and with different consequences. Is it really any surprise, therefore, that they are interpreted differently?
What's unethical about this?
Not saying I believe any of these to be valid, but these are the concerns people are likely to have:
1. "Playing god."
There is a major taboo with messing with our reproductive systems, and every time any major advance in reproductive science occurs, there are religious arguments against it. Compare it with IVF and birth control, both of which attracted a lot of attention from a number of religions and are considered unethical by many.
2. The technique enables a major change in the reproduction of our species. There does not appear to be any reason why the stem cells would have to come from male donor; this tecnique could result in a child with two female biological parents. Potentially even only one female biological parent. I can understand why this would worry a lot of people.
3. A child resulting from the use of this technique is quite likely to have a biological parent who never actually lived. This is a rather peculiar potential outcome, and may well worry some people.
I don't personally see any of these as a serious problem, as long as the technique is used sparingly. But you can bet there are a lot of people who find some or all of these ideas repugnant.
doesn't the fact that it was made in a lab mean it's NOT human?
No. Not unless you want to start claiming that all the people born because of IVF aren't human, which strikes me as a rather bizarre proposition.
Someone decides that the best way to do it is to put 10 in swords, 11 in shields, and 15 in fireballs...and all of a sudden that's what everyone is playing. So you wind up with absolutely no variety.
One solution to this is, of course, to design the PvE encounters so that a variety of different skills are needed, and _different players have to have them_. Sure, you need a player who's good at fireballs, but he needs to be standing back and handling the horde of little monsters that will heal the boss monster if they get too close, while your guy who's good with his sword and shield gets up close and finishes off the boss. Or other scenarios like that where you need two or more players who are good with just one or two different skills, rather than one ultra-powerful player who can do everything. And each encounter will require a different combination of skills. Some skills will be useless in some encounters; sometimes a particular skill will basically be essential. Design the game to encourage specialisation and cooperation rather than individual players learning everything.
There's a word at the beginning of the editor's first sentence that clarifies this, but apparently that wasn't enough.
So, let me get this straight, you're expecting Overly Critical Guy to be fair in his criticisms?
Thoughtcrimes have been on the books for years, except they're called "hate crimes".
Hate crimes are not thoughtcrime. Hate crimes are, typically, antipropoganda crimes -- they make it illegal to attempt to rouse a group of people into active hatred of another group. This is very different from what a lot of people seem to think of them as, i.e. laws against hating a group of people.
Which makes you wonder what the legislators were thinking when they passed those laws
Generally they were thinking that either 12 or 14 was too young (as was legal in most jurisdictions at one point of time or another).
Unless they were famous people, in which case my internal voyeur might be unable to resist.
And thus Gary Glitter met his fate.
it's a bug in Slashcode's CSS
I don't think it's a bug at all. I believe Slashdot's CSS designer _intended_ this to happen. It's too much of a coincidence that the style for 'i' is the same as the style for 'blockquote' and many slashdot posters (myself included) use the two for the same purpose.
Eve Online is brutal even in the safe areas. Anyone that ventures off the ranch gets smoked quick. Sounds the complete opposite of City of Heroes.
Have you actually played Eve? When I was a player I regularly spent time outside of the safe areas, e.g. visiting stations in low security systems that had cheap stuff I wanted, and was never attacked by another player. Seemed to me that as long as you minded your own business, and got in & out reasonably quickly, you were pretty safe.
Really? Am I the only person that found it interesting that Lucene, the only non C/C++ implementation, gave some pretty impressive stats?
Is it really that big a surprise? Given that some of the largest, most information-heavy sites on the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia) use it for their internal search?
The fastest production car is not the Bugatti, but the SSC Ultimate Aero TT. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastest_car
The model that set that record is no longer in production. A replacement model is available, but its top speed hasn't been verified.
No cup holder? I'll pass.
They likely looked at the kind of engineering problems a cup holder would present and decided it was too hard.
Think about it: 0-60 in 2.5 seconds == 10.72m/s^2. This car accelerates at _over 1G_. The cup holder would have to automatically swivel through 45 degrees to prevent it spilling your drink when you put your foot to the floor.
Having read the first 2 pages of TFA, I still don't see how fast of a connection you need for these to become playable. I mean, where I live, the best connection you can get is a ~1 Megabit DSL connection
The company's site states that it will work with a 512kbit connection, but that for best quality you should have 2Mbit.
I imagine they'll be using a 1-server-per-client model, at least with most games. Subscriptions will be expensive, at a guess, with the price worked out on the assumption that you'll be tying up a high-end gaming machine about 10-15% of the time. $120 or $180 per year sounds like a likely base price for the subscription, plus a small additional fee for game rental which will depend on what you're playing.
there isn't even a ps2 emu for iPhone and I doubt its powerful enough
I think we can assume you're correct. The fastest iPhone has a 600 MHz ARM Cortex processor with 2 execution units, whose base instruction set is 32-bit, but which supports 128-bit SIMD. The PS2 has a ~400MHz 64-bit MIPS-compatible processor with 2 execution units, also implementing 128-bit SIMD. Therefore, while the iPhone with a best-theoretically-possible emulator might manage to match or even beat the SIMD performace of the PS2, ordinary 64 bit instructions would necessarily be a little slower (taking 2 x 32-bit instructions to implement them), resulting in only a maximum of 600 being retired each microsecond, rather than 800 as the PS2 is (at least theoretically) capable of. This is ignoring emulation overheads, of course. And the question of emulation of the PS2's vector units, which would have to be mapped to the iPhone's GPU somehow.
I'd love to have this available for personal implementation.
I think you'd be surprised by how much an implementation of this would cost to set up. The only way, AFAICS, that they can be encoding the video output of the games to h.264 fast enough is a dedicated hardware encoder, which is probably about $2-300 worth of kit. Sure, you can do live h.264 encoding with a PC, but the latency is typically in the order of 10-15 frames or so, which would be unacceptable for this application.
I've messed with software RAID in Windows 2003 server for years and have never had a drive failure not reported to the Event Log.
Well, sure, but how often do you read your event log? Most users _never_ read their event log, so logging the failure like this is next to useless. This is something the user needs to know about, immediately. At the very least a notification area icon and pop-out box would be appropriate.